Sweet Sixteen
If you were to offer the average classical concertgoer a CD entitled Renaissance: Music for Inner Peace, they would give you a look similar to that which would occur if you clamped a car battery to their testicles. Indeed, when Harry Christophers and the Sixteen produced the aforementioned disc — a winner of that most coveted of prizes no less, a Classical Brit — it was felt that he had taken his group the Sixteen over to the dark side.
Yet after the Sixteen’s angelic and fantastically moving concert performance of Victoria’s Motets and his spectacular Requiem of 1605 at the Sheldonian, it would appear that their musical soul is very much intact. As Christophers himself is ready to admit, the Sixteen is going in a somewhat populist direction, yet it is his hope that those sucked in by the Classic FM tag and the musical snippets of the Renaissance album might come and see the Sixteen’s more serious shows.
Indeed, the choral pilgrimage, an idea that Christophers inaugurated a few years ago, is another attempt to bring polyphonic choral music to a diverse audience outside of London. In his quest to bring the works of Victoria, Tallis and Purcell to those beyond the greying and generally bearded world of early music, Christophers has done away with several of the sacred cows of current performance practice. He freely alters tempi and generally avoids instrumental doubling of vocal lines.
Indeed, in performing composers like Victoria, a figure of overt religiosity, if not Catholicism, Christophers feels that to explore the true emotional depths of the piece, a concert performance is far more appropriate than a liturgical one. Authenticity, rather than being the watchword of the performances of the Sixteen, has become under Christophers’ direction a springboard for exploration. For the moment, however, that exploration will probably remain firmly in the past.
Christophers is unequivocal in his belief that except for James MacMillan, whose O bone Jesu the Sixteen recently recorded, no modern English composer has mastered the art of choral writing. Instead Christophers plans to not only continue his exploration of more of the secular music of Handel and Purcell, especially the operas and more modern music such as the original version of Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem.
He also hopes to expand his Handel in Oxford from a long weekend (15 to 17 September this year) to a full week (the time it took Handel to receive his honorary degree from the university). Although it is in September, when most students are off sunning themselves, if you are trapped in Oxford there could be few more pleasant ways to pass a weekend, especially given the quality of the line-up for this year’s festival.
It is perhaps a testament to groups such as the Sixteen that they have made quite spartan and complex music not only approachable but also enjoyable for many, and despite the liberties that might be taken — liberties that Victoria would have condemned as heretical — Harry Christophers represents a success story. Admittedly, it is a heavily branded and rigorously marketed success, but in these dies irae of classical music, some say any success is better than nothing.
8th Jun 2006